Scriptor

The functionality was polished and sexy.

The UI was clunky and the epitome of what happens when programmers design. Everything was jam packed into the screen so that it was immediately obvious what kinds of things you could do or how to go about what you wanted to do. It introduced a lot of concepts all at once, causing an unnecessary learning curve.

I'm assuming Person is a record constructor, is isValid here a field in that record or another function?

That's because your code assumes those convenience functions exist while the parent's code writes out the anonymous functions.

The direct translation of yours' to Clojure would be:

    (filter valid-person? (map init-person names))

Meanwhile, the direct Haskell translation of the parent comment is:

    filter (\p -> isValid p) (map (\n -> Person n) names)

The Mayan script used a similar approach where logograms could be complemented by phonetic elements.

He's a geochemist, not an archaeologist. Racial issues aside, there have been many instances where a scientist in one field tries to make sweeping statements about another field. In most cases they lack a deep understanding of the other field and are unaware of mountains of evidence that otherwise contradict what they say.

I'm not a high-status authority and I was still able to connect emotionally to the human ones. Or, at the very least, each line contributed to a consistent mental picture or idea.

Yep, the human poems would often refer back to an idea or word mentioned before. The computer poems read like something from a good markov generator.

Actually, you can kind of reverse engineer the algorithm behind Sonnet #2. It seems like they first pick a bunch of related words that rhyme (drawer, door, floors, apartment, wall) and then build up the line backwards. The problem is that even though the words are related, the actual lines don't form any single cohesive image.

Luckily for us, computers are slightly more sophisticated than drills and we can incorporate sane safety checks with relative ease. In this case people are just asking for an explicit flag in the rare situation when they do want to delete everything.

Everyone I know uses Messenger for group conversations.

Anecdotes can go both ways. As far as I've been able to tell, WhatsApp is most popular outside of the US.

Agreed, the benefits of type safety are often thrown around but this is sort of what type safety looks like. Yes, as the author says it makes things "annoying to develop". This is because the developer now has to read the docs and be aware of this invariant for the particular component they're using. They'll go, "Damn, guess I can't use a list here," and fix their code.

However, let's say later down the line a new engineer comes in and is tasked with a bug fix. If they're using Cycle.js and see an array, they might think, "Oh, I can easily solve this by adding another element to this one-element array." Without any invariants they'll run into subtler bugs and errors trying to figure out what went wrong.

But with the invariant, if they tried to jam an array there they would immediately get an error and know what's wrong.

This isn't something that will crop up in a simple one-day project like the author was creating with his coworker. It's instead a great example of how a little annoyance can make future maintainability way easier.

The author even anticipated your parent comment's argument and used Elm for this very reason. He seems to make it reasonably clear where Elm's approach is different from that of Cycle.js and still both are preferable to React/Reduct.

True, although the harshness of Ice Age Europe varied over time. It wasn't some hellish landscape but a thriving ecosystem with all sorts of wildlife and other food sources.

The difference is that Neanderthals had hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to the environment of Ice Age Europe. They had even evolved actual physical adaptations to help them with the cold.

But the humans who moved into the Arctic only had a few thousand years at most to adapt, if that. Neanderthals certainly weren't dumb and primitive, but as you said they were narrowly focused. Modern humans were able to rapidly adapt their lifestyles and technology to allow them to thrive in extreme environments such as the Arctic.

They weren't ape-like idiots, but nonetheless newly arrived Homo Sapiens used noticeably more sophisticated tool-making techniques. This is one of the ways archaeologists are able to distinguish Neanderthal sites from, say, Cro-magnon sites. It is also thought that modern Homo Sapiens lived in groups much larger than Neanderthals did.

Looks like the story some time ago. Especially with emotionally charged stories like this, people always tend to misremember or warp the details and not realize they're doing so. I'm sure the general gist is right, but I always get a little suspect when someone describes eye-rolls or how someone sounded sarcastic. Those are exactly the sorts of things that we remember differently as time goes on.

It'd be easy enough to check for that by having a control where you interview people without using the extra storytelling-lie-detection methods.

Can you give some details about Imba's diffing?

Sensational title. The actual stone age was called such because humans were actively modifying and creating new stone tools.

Actually, HN lets you edit titles and URL's after they're already submitted. There might be limits on that, though. Check for an 'edit' link.

The URL is entered wrong. Remove the /# from the end and that should fix it.

> Catholics murdering them with terrible savagery

I see what you're trying to get at, but you make it sound as though the Islamic world was brutally traumatized by the Crusades. The savagery was no more terrible than any war of that time. And they didn't really "seal themselves off from the world". They did, however, seal themselves off from Europe culturally and intellectually. Politically and economically there was still plenty of engagement.

What the Crusades did do was to further hamper the adoption of European ideas in the Islamic World. While the Crusaders were happy to adopt both goods and knowledge from the Middle East, Arabs and Turks saw little reason to embrace any European customs and ways of thought. The Crusaders were invaders in their own lands and for that reason alone a typical Arab's perception of Europeans would've been much worse than a typical Frank's perception of "Saracens".

Amin Maalouf gives an example towards the end of "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes" (decent book, by the way, though I liked "Arab Historians of the Crusades" better). As the Crusades progressed and Europe entered the high middle ages peasants in the West started to gain more rights and privileges as the feudal system continued to weaken. However, none of this was seen in the Middle East, where local lords ruled their holdings with an iron grip and peasant rights barely improved.

Since C++ is also still used plenty throughout the world, I think he might've meant that it failed to live up to the expectations placed on it as a good balance of structural and functional.

Awesome! I'm going to try it out now.

This looks interesting and I have something I'd like to use it on, but the documentation could add a few things. How do I install this? How do I run a script?

Is there any way to restrict your app's environment beyond the default sandbox restrictions Google applies? For example, disabling things like urllib2.

People might also be interested in http://try-hy.appspot.com/.

Does anyone know how they do sandboxing in there? Judging from the source (https://github.com/hylang/tryhy/blob/master/main.hy) repl.eval is called on each expression. I'm guessing it just uses App Engine's default python sandboxing.

I was just about to ask how well this would work as a companion to tapl. I'm still very early in the book so the notation isn't indecipherable, but I'm sure it'll get there soon.

I know Guy Steele was part of Java's original design committee, but in what ways was Java at all "Lisp's bastard child".

There was a post a bit back (which you might be referencing) about almost this exact situation, except it was about black hat SEO dramatically backfiring. Specifically, businesses were asking bloggers and news sites to delete spam comments that linked back to the sites.

The HTML that Mahbod wants you to paste looks pretty similar to what those spam comments were like...

Ah, I used one million because it really hammers the scale of it in, but I like that with 100 you can easily track the percentages.